Shred Sisters

Shred Sisters / Grove Atlantic

I was in the mood for a novel about family relationships, something Cheever-esque. Maybe, I thought, a sharp, contained work of fiction would be a temporary antidote to a world that feels out of control.

Because I admired Betsy Lerner’s 2016 memoir The Bridge Ladies, I thought her new debut novel, Shred Sisters, might just be the right choice. Turns out, I landed on a good book for the wrong reasons.

Shred Sisters is, indeed, incisive and wry; but, given its central subject — an upper-middle-class, Jewish, suburban family all-but-capsized by the mental illness of one of its members — this novel is anything but contained and controlled.

Shred Sisters spans the 1970s through the 1990s and focuses intensely on the relationship between the two Shred sisters who live with their parents in New Haven, Conn. Amy, the younger sister, is our narrator: She’s small, shy, a scrupulous obeyer of rules. One of her favorite games as a kid is one she calls “Movies” where she “scatter[s] garbage on the floor and sweep[s] it up” — like a theater usher.

Older sister Olivia, known as “Ollie,” is the star of the family: She’s beautiful, charismatic and — as becomes increasingly clear during her teenage years — she struggles with mental illness. Here are snippets from the opening of the novel, which takes place when Amy is 10 and Ollie is 14. Amy recalls that:

By the time [Dad] reached Ollie, she was soaked in blood.

Ollie had dared me to jump on the couch with her. Using the thick cushions as a trampoline, she made a swishing sound as she jumped, touching the ceiling and dunking an imaginary basketball. Only when she took a jump shot from the side, not realizing the power in her legs, she crashed into the picture window behind the couch. For a second there was silence, then the window splintered into a web of shards that rained down on my sister ...

Later [Ollie] joked that she looked like a giant tampon ...

That opening gives fair warning of the erratic periods of chaos and exhaustion that will define the Shred family’s life for decades — especially as Ollie begins stealing things, raging and disappearing. She’s eventually sent to a psychiatric hospital that Amy and her parents tactfully refer to as “The Place."

One of the aspects of coping with mental illness that Lerner vividly captures is the limits of 1970s and '80s psychiatry to treat what Amy later speculates is bipolar disorder. The Shred parents never get a diagnosis for Ollie; Amy, left on her own, reads popular books of the era to try to grasp what’s going on: “They all had a girl on the cover [Amy tells us], brunette and brooding. Go Ask Alice ... The Bell Jar. None of the girls reminded me of Ollie.”

After two years, Ollie is discharged, unchanged, and disappears for even longer stretches. Drained of energy for each other, the Shred parents, Amy says, “split slowly, like the subterranean forces that pulled apart the jagged coasts of South America and Africa.”

As she did in The Bridge Ladies, Lerner elevates what may sound like yet another pop saga of endurance, measured recovery and forgiveness into a closely observed story that’s ragged and wry. The final two-thirds of this novel focus on Amy herself — the usher in the shadows who’s spent decades powerlessly observing and cleaning up after this family movie.

Change, as we know, is hard; but, there’s a moment where the adult Amy, who’s been demoralized by loneliness and career failure, spontaneously walks into a hair salon. She’s pulled in by a sign that reads: “Never give up on your hair.”

These are the kind of revelatory ordinary human moments Lerner captures with precision. As an affirmation, “Never give up on your hair” turns out to be a more modest way to declare, “I will survive.”